The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Dexter Palmer

  Oh, God—Miranda!

  FIFTY-NINE

  And Miranda says:

  Now. Here we are, in this secret place. Sit down, in the grass, and feel its cold morning dampness beneath you. Listen to the wind blowing through the leaves of the trees that make this bower.

  Listen. We are running out of time. Soon we won’t be able to speak without worrying about whether we’re understood. We won’t be able to dream without it meaning something when we awake. We won’t be able to look into mirrors without wishing that they had the power to lie. Hurry.

  It’s simple. Look at me. Come close and look at me, closer: see that I have a smell that is my very own, like a fingerprint or a signature. Look at the wrinkles of fat that are disappearing from my hands, at my fingers, which will soon be long and slender. Look at the curve of my chin where it becomes my neck. The imperfections of color in my iris, with flecks of green suspended in their blue. The flare of my nostrils. The golden red sheen of my hair. The gentle shape of my mouth, and the way I stretch one side of it into a smile as I shrink away and blush, revealing a single dimple. Simple. Like this: kiss.

  INTERLUDE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  —I remember what happened next! Father barged in on our child wedding all upset, eyes red as hot coals, jets of steam shooting from his ears. “Why, Harold Winslow! What are you doing?! Are you . . . are you kissing my daughter!? The nerve of you! Next you’ll have your trousers down! Get out of my Tower!” Grabbing you by the scrawny scruff of your neck, shaking you like a rag doll while I looked on and you complained, “But I didn’t mean anything! It’s not what you think!” “Get out!” I’m surprised he didn’t throw you straight through a window, letting you rethink your poor behavior while you plummeted to the ground. “Get out! GET OUT OF MY TOWER!”

  I can hear what you have to say: it’s not clear whom I think I’m fooling, with this business about “searching for Miranda.” Perhaps you think this is some kind of dumb fable, a means to evoke the rhetorical question “Ah, but can one person ever really know another? Are we not all mysteries to each other? Is not Woman an eternal mystery to Man?” It’s all very profound, and at the end of the story we discover that Miranda (Woman) was just an objectified fragment of Harold’s (Man’s) imagination, just like the voices from his past. All very academic. Poor crazy Harold Winslow. No.

  The question at hand isn’t “Where’s Miranda?”; it’s “Why can’t Harold find her?” Though this ship dwarfs all other zeppelins in size, it is not infinitely large, and it obeys conventional laws of physics, even in the heart of its malfunctioning perpetual motion machine. The ship is not a place of magic. In fact, by now I’ve searched it from stem to stern dozens of times. I’ve gone through the galley, the bedrooms, the hold, the steel garden, the laboratory, the observation deck, the boiler room. I’ve discovered every secret panel and hidden hatchway large enough to hold a woman. I’ve spent weeks poring over blueprints. I’ve been everywhere on this ship, and I cannot find her. And yet, from her secret place, she continues to speak to me.

  Why do I not speak back? you’re asking. What deception could be so enormous that its perpetration would sew a man’s lips shut?

  Again—all in good time.

  I have not yet told you that there is another man’s voice, here in the zeppelin with us. Like mine, it prefers to speak of the past.

  Next to the obsidian desk in the observation room, within reach of my hand when I sit in its chair and look out at the clouds and stars, there patiently stands a little mechanical boy, about three feet tall, its body plated in gold and inlaid with bronze. Unlike all the other mechanical men on this ship, whose functional designs betray their factory origins, this one features irregularities and filigrees that signal handmade craft. Implanted between its shoulder blades is a ten-digit keypad, and beneath the keypad is etched the flowing signature of its artisan, Prospero Taligent.

  Most of the time it’s silent and still, but pressing a series of three digits on its back brings the mechanical child to life with the cheerful sound of a cash register ringing up a sale. Then it turns smartly and walks over to a wall of the observation room, where an array of compartments are labeled with three-digit numbers, each one holding a wooden cylinder about two inches in diameter and six inches long. The cylinders are covered in bloodred wax that is finely scored with grooves from end to end.

  Delicately, the tin child retrieves the cylinder from the compartment; then it marches to stand before me, on the other side of the desk. With its left hand it lifts the latch of a small square hatch that has been set into its stomach where its navel should be; then with its right it swivels the hatch open and plunges the cylinder into its guts.

  Once it closes the hatch again, it makes the cash-register sound again and cups its hands to its mouth, which is frozen open in a permanent O of surprise. It stands there for a moment, as if drawing breath in preparation to hail someone in the distance; then, out of its mouth comes, tinny and scratchy, the voice of its maker.

  The one thousand wax cylinders constitute Prospero Taligent’s diaries, recorded intermittently over a span of fifteen years. How far back did he envision all this—the zeppelin that serves as his tomb, the shining tin boy speaking with his voice, and someone imprisoned here to listen to him? When he started drawing up the plans for the mechanical boy, he must have foreseen his own death. He was already thinking, back then, that I would find him and kill him, and that later I would sit at this desk to hear his tales.

  I have a recurring dream that goes something like this. It is a variation on a theme: this time I have made it to the top of the obsidian tower, and I can see the back of the virgin queen as she stands on the edge of the tower’s roof, contemplating the long fall.

  “It’s not me that wants to jump,” she says. “It’s the shoes. They have a curse on them that makes them kill their owner. I didn’t know until I slipped them on and felt the fresh warm blood of the newly dead between my toes. They’ve carried me up this tower’s spiraling staircase against my will, and now they’re going to throw me off.

  “You can save me. The way to break the spell is this: I have to hear the voice of the person I love the most, which is you.” The sunlight shines off her crystalline crown. “It can be any word. Any word at all: nothing beautiful, nothing poetic. I just need to hear the sound of your voice. But don’t you touch me: if you reach out to touch me, then I’ll jump. Now. Save me.”

  The cursed shoes are dancing now, bringing her closer to thin air. The cheers of the crowd below come to my ears, faint and distorted. It is about this time that I become aware of the presence of my inverse, on the roof of the tower with me. This is hard to explain, but the best way is to say that he is my opposite in an axiomatic, fundamental way, a kind of wolsniW dloraH. It’s as if, just by being present on the roof of the tower, he makes me invisible and worthless, even though, in most ways, we are identical twins.

  As I open my mouth to tell the virgin queen that I love her, he opens his. My inverse is not malicious or evil. His face wears the same expression as mine, of concern and despair and fear. As I speak the words “I love you,” he speaks them as well, but in his own language, which is the inverse of mine. “uoy evol I,” he says, and as the sounds from our mouths merge in the air, the result is dead silence.

  The virgin queen waits patiently on the edge for me to save her. “Don’t jump!” I yell. “pmuj t’noD!” yells my inverse, equally frustrated. Again both of us hear nothing. “Wait!” “tiaW!” “Listen!” “netsiL!” “Please!” “esaelP!” We move our mouths like mutes or mimes and throw our hands in the air. It’s not that my inverse is deliberately using his inverse-speech to trip me up for his motivelessly malign ends; he just can’t help it, because, except for being my inverse, he is me. The queen is asking questions now, and I can hear the sobs in her voice, and I dearly wish that she would turn around to look at me: “Why won’t you speak to me? Do you want me to die? Are you trying to kill me?” “
Let me explain,” I shout, but of course my inverse shouts “nialpxe em teL” equally loudly, which does no good. At last, in frustration, I run across the roof to try to stop her in spite of her warning, and just as she said, when I reach out to grab her my hand closes on a hint of skin and empty air, and she is on her way down, falling on her back so that she can pierce me with her gaze full of blame.

  I want to thank you, Harold, for beginning to speak to me, even though you claim to have sworn yourself to silence. There’s no real reason for you to speak your sentences aloud as you beat them into shape, but you do it, and I like to think that I might fill the shoes of that invisible reader you seem to long for. So continue. If we can’t have a conversation, at least we can have this. Everything left in the twentieth century is artifice and simulation, anyway; I don’t see why this should be any different. But I do wish that you could at least admit to yourself that you’re telling this story to me, and not yourself or any of those past selves that you’re always going on about. I hope you’ll think about including these words I speak right now; that’ll be a start.

  Besides, my love, I must admit that you have a bit of a knack for spinning a tale. I think I’m due to show up again soon, aren’t I? The world changed so much in those intervening years, and my father and his company were single-handedly responsible for much of that change. That was when I finally got the nerve to run away from home. I remember your face when you recognized me in the deserted warehouse. You were so surprised. Shy little virgin that you were, you suddenly had a pair of women to deal with. It couldn’t have been easy. Not between me and Astrid.

  Astrid.

  Beautiful bronze Astrid. Dearest, only sister.

  Lovely suicide girl.

  What have you done.

  THREE

  music for an

  automatic

  bronzing

  ONE

  The bars of Picturetown are nearly always empty on weekday afternoons, and so Harold prefers them as meeting places, on those rare occasions when he has people whom he wishes to meet. Even when he doesn’t, they are good places to get a head start on a day’s worth of steady drinking—one can purchase a generous shot of no-name blended whiskey and nurse it in a corner, scribbling acidic aphorisms in a notebook with unlined pages, playing at being a writer or, worse, an intellectual.

  He is waiting at this particular bar for his sister, Astrid, whom he hasn’t seen in months, though they both still live in the same city. She will be late, as she almost always is for all appointments, since it seems that those few people in the world who are lucky or savvy enough to earn a living from making art are allowed to ignore the hands of clocks. This isn’t as bad as it might be—if he applies himself, he can be a pint ahead of her when she arrives, and this will make her easier to tolerate. Astrid and Harold have changed a great deal in ten years, and it became clear to him some time ago that were she not his sister, he would not choose to be her friend. Still, though, out of honor of a genetic commonality, he calls her on her birthday and on holidays, and every once in a while he meets her at a bar or restaurant, to listen to her chatter or to shrive her if necessary (which, for her, it usually is).

  The bartender comes up to Harold and points at the gigantic pictographic menu that takes up most of the wall behind him; Harold indicates a pint of lager (or at least that’s what he guesses it is, judging from the color of the beer in the glass—it’s a painting, though, and lifelike as it is, with a healthy froth of head and beads of moisture running down the glass’s sides, who knows if the portrayal is anywhere near accurate to what he’ll get). In silence the bartender trudges over to the tap and starts the pour, and Harold slaps down the proper number of coins on the bar, plus a tip—as custom dictates in the bars of Picturetown, the ringing smack of the coins against the wood instead of their silent placement indicates that change is to be kept, and when the bartender hears this, he nods at Harold and smiles. He takes care with filling the pint glass to the top then, making a show of it.

  It’s noon, and the bar has just opened—the place isn’t even fully cleaned up yet from the night before. One boy silently mops the canting wooden tables with a damp, dingy rag, while another uses a push broom to pile up the hundreds and hundreds of index cards left on the floor from the night before, the detritus of pickups and drunk talk. Harold looks down at a bunch of the cards that are strewn beneath his barstool: some have symbols that he thinks he understands, such as hearts with arrows drawn through them or daggers clutched in disembodied hands; some are covered with those odd picturelike words that remind Harold of the instructions that accompanied the components of the windup dolls that his father used to make before his eyesight went; some have words in English, likely penned by patrons like himself who wish to obey the custom of the country; some of the messages appear to be in codes that he has no hope of deciphering, the means of their decryption known by two at most.

  Some critics view the refusal of the residents of Picturetown to speak aloud under all but the direst of circumstances as primitive, or barbaric, or as evidence of a religious impulse that, lacking an easy outlet in a godless world, has shunted itself into this bizarre secular mode of expression. They point to its children, who fail to thrive in the city’s public schools, and at the severe underrepresentation of the district in city politics. But to Harold this behavior is a kind of common sense, a straightforward acknowledgment of what language has become in a mechanical age. In the age of miracles that his father used to talk of, spoken words had an infinitesimally temporary existence, as their speakers used their mouths to change the motion of molecules for just long enough a time to hold a message; in this age, like the index cards lying on the floor beneath him, all messages have the potential to be permanent, no matter their medium or their triviality. The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog.

  TWO

  The only other people in the bar at this early hour are a man and a woman, seated at the bar a few stools away from Harold. She wears a short tight apple-green dress and matching pillbox hat, and grease-pencil lines are drawn down the backs of her calves to simulate stockings; he wears a suit and loosened tie and huddles over his martini. Their body language speaks of assignation. They both have stacks of index cards in front of them and are scribbling away with ballpoint pens, furiously trading endearments back and forth, passionately flinging ink-splotched cards to the floor. Perhaps later this afternoon a private eye will sift through them, looking for evidence against one lover or the other, or third-rate rakes with leaden tongues will steal their words to use as their own. Perhaps trash-can scavengers will give their lovesongs second lives.

  Astrid arrives just as Harold is finishing his beer. “Harold!” she cries as soon as she’s entered the bar, her shrill voice piercing the silence, and the other two patrons both tense their shoulders as the bartender favors Astrid with a nasty glare. So oblivious. So goddamn rude. “Harold, it is so, so good to see you.” She struts toward him, kicking aside clouds of index cards. “Mwah. Mwah.”

  What’s happened to her? The person that she is seems like a shell designed to cover up the person that Harold once knew her to be. For a professional artist she has little sense in sartorial matters—her blouse looks cut to reveal cleavage that she doesn’t have; her fishnet stockings are out of fashion, if indeed they were ever in; her lipstick’s on crooked. Her gawky gait, held over from childhood, is grievously ill-suited for her three-inch stilettos. “Could I have a beer!” she screeches at the bartender. “A. Beer.” Harold realizes that given the choice between offending his sister by telling her to shut her mouth and offending the other patrons of the bar by carrying on an audible conversation, he’ll be forced to pick the latter. He won’t be able to return here for months. Thanks a million, Astrid.

  Fortunately, once they order a round and remove to a booth, she lowers her voice a bit
. “I had a devil of a time getting here, I have to say,” she says. “I took a cab, but it was one of those new ones that’s got a tin man for a driver—easier to hail since no one trusts them, you know, but half the time who knows where you’ll end up. So it gets me about a dozen blocks away from here, and I’ve got my fingers crossed, then—get this—it just pulls over to a parking space and the top of its skull just pops right off and lands in the passenger seat. And little gears and bolts start spewing out of the damn thing’s brainpan, pinging against the windshield, flying all over the place. I thought, well fuck this, I’ll just walk. And here I am! I sure could use some weed, you know?”

  The bartender brings over two stacks of index cards and two ballpoint pens, courtesy of the house, but Astrid cheerfully waves them away: “We won’t be needing those. My brother and I have not seen each other in some time, and when we do see each other we prefer to talk to each other. We are going to talk. Thank. You.” The bartender frowns and leaves the cards there anyway. “Don’t people speak English here?” Astrid says, all shifty-eyed.